Sympathy over Walsh Street comes 'too late'

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Frank Eyre holds a picture of his son Damian. He rejects an expression of sympathy from Wendy Peirce, who lied to stop her husband going to jail for murder.Photo: Shepparton News

THE family of Damian Eyre  one of two policemen ambushed
and shot dead in Walsh Street, South Yarra, 17 years ago  has
rejected an expression of sympathy from Wendy Peirce, the woman who
lied to stop her husband from being jailed for the murders.

While he bore little rancour towards Mrs Peirce, Constable
Eyre's father Frank said yesterday that her claim that she felt
"sorry" for the victims' families came too late to have
meaning.

"It doesn't mean anything to me because anyone can say that,"
said Mr Eyre, 70, speaking from his Shepparton home.

"They'd never come out in the past 17 years and said they felt
sorry over the death of those boys. That doesn't hold water with me
at all. It's too easy to say, 'Well, OK, I'm sorry.'

"The hard part, and the part that I'll probably never get over,
was the way that it (the murders) was done and the way that she
concealed it for 17 years. Those boys were lured up that lane and
assassinated."

Mr Eyre's comments followed Mrs Peirce's first public admission,
in an interview published in The Age yesterday, that her
husband, the late Victor Peirce, was responsible for the deaths of
Damian Eyre and colleague Steven Tynan.

Mrs Peirce had refused to testify against her husband at his
Supreme Court trial, a decision that led to her being sentenced to
18 months' jail.

In the interview, Mrs Peirce also said the killings were a
"payback" against police after detectives killed Victor Peirce's
best friend, Graeme Jensen, a day earlier. Her statements confirmed
the suspicions of police and the Eyre family, and yesterday gave
the latter a limited sense of resolution.

"I always had my own beliefs about how it was done, who did it
and the parts that were played by each (suspect), and this has
clarified all that," said Mr Eyre, himself a policeman of 45 years'
standing.

"I hope that the members of that entire taskforce who worked
their absolute butts off get some satisfaction out of today's
paper. Really, I wouldn't blame them if they all got together now
in a pub somewhere, having a big pot. They were the ones who worked
so hard and would have been very disappointed (at the time of the
unsuccessful trial), knowing what they knew."

Mr Eyre's other son, Daryl, 49, a senior constable based in
Cobram, shared his father's ambivalence towards Mrs Peirce's
admissions. "I've been 30 years in the police force and I've been
operational for those 30 years. I don't take a lot on face value.
But if her reasons for coming out are valid, I admire her," he
said.

Wendy Pierce.Photo:Craig Abraham

"I understand where she's coming from, that she wants a new life
for her and her children.

"I respect that, but she's very lucky to have the luxury of
still having her children."

He remembered Damian as a happy-go-lucky character, as a "total
ladies' man" and, finally, as a man who in time would have become a
great policeman.

"I never wanted him to get hurt, but if it were going to happen,
I wish he had have had another 10 years at least  to have a
go at his life's dream."

And she told the ABC: "You know you think about people's lives
that would have been different, a whole lot of things would have
been different if she had have come out at the time, and if a jury
obviously had have believed her and then convicted."